Christ in Christmas

In the capitalist Free World, the Coca Cola company helped to push the Santa Claus mythos across the mainstream: Fat Man, Coke Red suit, enjoying a soda.

It was thought harmless, a taste of joy and light for the masses.  The Christmas Spirit, however without Christ, and nary once referencing the Christmas story.

Then we're given a film called the Christmas Story in which we see modern culture come forward and devoured Christ, a kind of post-Christian quasi-Christian Christ-less season of giving.

And the boy, Ralphie, we would remember, barely smiled, but seem to just careen and pass through various scenes of little wants and traditions rendered almost meaningless.

Of life without Christ, the Bible gives us a horrifying glimpse in the books of Jeremiah and Lamentations, as Jeremiah was left behind in the ruin of Israel after the captivity.  He was witnessed horrors, borne of necessity, as the remnant struggled to survive.

Modern culture perhaps, "#thestruggleisreal" as how we too thrash about and beg in a world that is losing Christ, more and more.

However.

We are the representatives, we are the "little Christs" we are the modern disciples, we the believers.  We are the humble that the Lord sent to perplex the wise.

We can bring Christ back in our examples, and no I don't advocate "works" per se, like a regimen of course that would endear us back to God's busom, but instead a reminder for the society around us.

A reminder of.

The spirit of Christ.

The spirit of giving.

The spirit of Love.

We can be that as we hold the torch for the Christian world, just like the early light at the cave on Easter morning.

psalm 39 and 40

"And now, Lord, what wait I for? my hope is in thee. Deliver me from my transgressions: make me not the reproach of the foolish."

 

Psalm 39

"Many, O Lord my God, are thy wonderful works which thou hast done, and thy thoughts which are toward us: they cannot be reckoned up in order unto thee: if I would declare and speak them, they are more than can be numbered."

Psalm 40

Tozer, Titus and the Ayotollah.

The Bible was written in tears and to tears it will yield its best treasures. God has nothing to say to the frivolous man.... -AW Tozer

But after that the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man appeared...which he shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour; that being justified by his grace, we should be made heirs.

- Titus 3:4,6-7 

Mission Network News reports on the internal conflict in Iran:

https://www.mnnonline.org/news/protestor-execution-marks-shift-in-iran/

Missionary work, and places that still need Missionary work...

A pastor was attacked and murdered in Southeast Asia....

  https://www.mnnonline.org/news/pastor-martyred-for-sharing-the-gospel/

John Piper on God's saving visions as a propitiation....

John Piper talking about God revealing the Gospel through visions.  Does Christ, God and the Holy Spirit move in such a way?

https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/does-god-still-save-the-lost-through-visions

Spurgeon on Hope and Spiritual Restoration.

"The light may not fully come till our hopes are quite spent by waiting all day to no purpose. To the wicked the sun goes down while it is yet day: to the righteous the sun rises when it is almost night. May we not with patience wait for that heavenly light, which may be long in coming but is sure to prove itself well worth waiting for?" 

"Glory be to His name! All things need making new, for they are sadly battered and worn by sin. It is time that the old vesture was rolled up and laid aside, and that creation put on her Sunday suit. But no one else can make all things new except the LORD who made them at the first; for it needs as much power to make out of evil as to make out of nothing."

-Charles H Spurgeon

Contemplation and learnings, dimensions between thought and prayer....

Always make it a practice to stir your own mind thoroughly to think through what you have easily believed. Your position is not really yours until you make it yours through suffering and study. The author or speaker from whom you learn the most is not the one who teaches you something you didn’t know before, but the one who helps you take a truth with which you have quietly struggled, give it expression, and speak it clearly and boldly. -Oswald Chambers

Immediately, talking about the synthesis between faith and knowledge, we know the heart can be mislead, and the mind will "poke holes" in our faith, but there is "heart knowledge" and "head knowledge".  Oh how the metaphors are used so differently even among the 66 books of the God's Word.

But that synthesis between faith and knowledge leads us to a kind of mystical contemplation, something blurring the dimensions between thought and prayer.....